Is Having More RAM Better??

depends on what you are doing. If you use your computer for office tasks and email then 1Gb is plenty. If you are using it for 3d renderings of a wiring harness on the space shuttle, best go for 4Gb. The average user has no need for more then 2Gb (on XP), this will be enough for some video rendering, music, multitasking, etc. Anything more starts getting into a professional level and they know what they need.

Note: Vista needs a bit more memory. Im not a 'user' of the OS so I'm not entirely sure what requirements are needed for each package, Home vs. Ultimate. But i do believe they are higher.

The 2gb is very nice and the max for 32bit machines is 3gb.
(btw; be sure your pagefile is 2x your ram )

The two resources that get 'consumed' are HD and RAM. After that, you want
bus speed and cpu cycles to make it hum.

You're going to need some heavy processing to have some single application 'starve'
for memory and most of us don't come close to paging to death our systems
(ie when you start paging heavily on a regular basis, THEN you need more ram).

make your page file 2 to 3 time your commit charge not your physical memory
do alt control delete
open up 2 to 3 programs that you use normally
look at the commit charge
set your page file to 2 to 3 times
play with it to get a smooth fast running machine

lol funny enough the settings which i set already was perfect for my system which is weird because i had just put random guess init LOL but yeh joebeard ur rit dude there are MANY ways of tunin systems. thAnks for ur helps guys as usual

If you install more than 2GB of RAM in a 32 bit XP box, you can run into more problems than you solve. To even utilize more than 2GB, you have to implement the "3 Gigabyte switch" (Google that). XP refuses (by default) more than 2GB to programs. Consequently, depending on which program is involved, you can get an "out of memory" error when more than 2GB is installed in spite of the fact it's actually available. There seems to be a different way XP reports available RAM depending on if it's using it or if it's simply refusing it. I hope that explanation makes sense.

Any 32 bit OS will break your heart when you try to install 3 or 4 GB of memory. In the real world, the biggest performance jump with XP comes at 512MB to 1GB. When you go to 2GB there's an improvement true, but it's not as noticeable. Programmers are pretty conservative about memory use in most cases, since if the system requirements are too high, they can't sell the software.

High hardware requirements is still one of the biggest complaints about Vista at the moment, is it not?

When you go to 3D, High Def movie, and professional photo editing software the need for extravagant amounts of RAM is actual, since the file sizes are enormous. If this is the work you're trying to do, then a 64 bit OS is called for. For anything else, treat yourself to the 2GB, and be happy!

Any 32 bit OS will break your heart when you try to install 3 or 4 GB of memory. In the real world, the biggest performance jump with XP comes at 512MB to 1GB. When you go to 2GB there's an improvement true, but it's not as noticeable. Programmers are pretty conservative about memory use in most cases, since if the system requirements are too high, they can't sell the software.

High hardware requirements is still one of the biggest complaints about Vista at the moment, is it not?

When you go to 3D, High Def movie, and professional photo editing software the need for extravagant amounts of RAM is actual, since the file sizes are enormous. If this is the work you're trying to do, then a 64 bit OS is called for. For anything else, treat yourself to the 2GB, and be happy!

Click to expand...

3GB will run fine in a 32bit operating system, in fact a 32 bit operating system can address a total (including graphcis etc) of 3.2GB of memory without an issue. 2GB is the minimum for vista (it idles using 1GB approx) whereas 1GB is min for XP.